Did Donald Trump Just Kick Off his 2024 Presidential Campaign?

During a packed rally in Arizona, former President Donald Trump did not officially announce his plans to take another run at the White House in 2024, but it sure sounded like he had.

Speaking in front of a sea of supporters gathered at Trump’s first “campaign-style” rally of 2022 in Florence, Arizona, Trump delivered what sounded like his first stump speech of a possible 2024 run. With declaring his candidacy, Trump said to the cheering crowds that come 2024, “we are going to take back the White House.” 

To rapturous applause, Trump repeatedly took aim at President Biden, who allegedly defeated him in the 2020 presidential election. Trump deemed his successor in the White House “incompetent” and blasted Biden on a wide range of issues, including the coronavirus pandemic, the economy, foreign policy, and crime.

While Trump looked ahead to 2024 as well as this year’s midterm elections – he predicted that “a great red wave is going to begin right here in Arizona” and vowed that “this is the year we take back the House, this is the year we take back the Senate” – he spent much of his speech looking back to his 2020 election loss to Biden.

The former president repeated his claims that the 2020 election was “rigged” and once again claimed that “I ran twice, and we won twice.”

It was no surprise that Trump chose Arizona to kick off his first rally of the new year. Besides being a key battleground in the 2022 midterms, with high profile showdowns for Senate and governor, it is also one of a half-dozen states where Biden narrowly edged Trump in 2020 to win the White House. 

Last year, a Trump-fueled and GOP-driven partisan audit of votes was conducted in Maricopa County, Arizona’s most populous county. Results of the review found that Trump received a couple of hundred fewer votes than the results from the certified election.

Trump’s “unofficial” 2024 campaign moves on next to Conroe, Texas, which is north of Houston, for a rally on Saturday, Jan. 29.

According to Fox News, a trusted source told them that the former president plans to hold roughly two rallies per month going forward.

According to the most recent polling, 69% of Republicans want to see Trump run again. But that’s down from 78% who said the same thing in Quinnipiac’s October survey.